Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5

by Lawrence Block

  I'd received a warning last night and I'd spent the intervening hours disregarding it. And the clerk who gave me Danny Boy's message had volunteered that I'd had a couple of other calls from people who'd declined to leave their names. They might have been friends of the chap in the lumber jacket, calling to offer a word to the wise.

  I dropped the gun into a pocket, went out and hailed a cab.

  * * *

  Danny Boy insisted on buying the drinks, vodka for himself, ginger ale for me. He looked as natty as ever, and he'd been to the barber since I last saw him. His cap of tight white curls was closer to his scalp, and his manicured nails showed a coating of clear polish.

  He said, "I've got two things for you. A message and an opinion."

  "Oh?"

  "The message first. It's a warning."

  "I thought it might be."

  "You should forget about the Dakkinen girl."

  "Or what?"

  "Or what? Or else, I suppose. Or you get what she got, something like that. You want a specific warning so you can decide whether it's worth it or not?"

  "Who's the warning come from, Danny?"

  "I don't know."

  "What spoke to you? A burning bush?"

  He drank off some of his vodka. "Somebody talked to somebody who talked to somebody who talked to me."

  "That's pretty roundabout."

  "Isn't it? I could give you the person who talked to me, but I won't, because I don't do that. And even if I did it wouldn't do you any good, because you probably couldn't find him, and if you did he still wouldn't talk to you, and meanwhile somebody's probably going to whack you out. You want another ginger ale?"

  "I've still got most of this one."

  "So you do. I don't know who the warning's from, Matt, but from the messenger they used I'd guess it's some very heavy types. And what's interesting is I get absolutely nowhere trying to find anybody who saw Dakkinen on the town with anybody but our friend Chance. Now if she's going with somebody with all this firepower, you'd think he'd show her around, wouldn't you? Why not?"

  I nodded. For that matter, why would she need me to ease her out of Chance's string?

  "Anyway," he was saying, "that's the message. You want the opinion?"

  "Sure."

  "The opinion is I think you should heed the message. Either I'm getting old in a hurry or this town's gotten nastier in the past couple of years. People seem to pull the trigger a lot quicker than they used to. They used to need more of a reason to kill. You know what I mean?"

  "Yes."

  "Now they'll do it unless they've got a reason not to. They'll sooner kill than not. It's an automatic response. I'll tell you, it scares me."

  "It scares everybody."

  "You had a little scene uptown a few nights back, didn't you? Or was somebody making up stories?"

  "What did you hear?"

  "Just that a brother jumped you in the alley and wound up with multiple fractures."

  "News travels."

  "It does for a fact. Of course there's more dangerous things in this city than a young punk on angel dust."

  "Is that what he was on?"

  "Aren't they all? I don't know. I stick to basics, myself." He underscored the line with a sip of his vodka. "About Dakkinen," he said. "I could pass a message back up the line."

  "What kind of message?"

  "That you're letting it lay."

  "That might not be true, Danny Boy."

  "Matt-"

  "You remember Jack Benny?"

  "Do I remember Jack Benny? Of course I remember Jack Benny."

  "Remember that bit with the stickup man? The guy says, 'Your money or your life,' and there's a long pause, a really long pause, and Benny says, 'I'm thinking it over.' "

  "That's the answer? You're thinking it over?"

  "That's the answer."

  Outside on Seventy-second Street I stood in the shadows in the doorway of a stationery store, waiting to see if anyone would follow me out of Poogan's. I stood there for a full five minutes and thought about what Danny Boy had said. A couple of people left Poogan's while I was standing there but they didn't look like anything I had to worry about.

  I went to the curb to hail a cab, then decided I might as well walk half a block to Columbus and get one going in the right direction. By the time I got to the corner I decided it was a nice night and I was in no hurry, and an easy stroll fifteen blocks down Columbus Avenue would probably do me good, make sleep come that much easier. I crossed the street and headed downtown and before I'd covered a block I noticed that my hand was in my coat pocket and I was holding onto the little gun.

  Funny. No one had followed me. What the hell was I afraid of?

  Just something in the air.

  I kept walking, displaying all the street smarts I hadn't shown Saturday night. I stayed at the edge of the sidewalk near the curb, keeping my distance from buildings and doorways. I looked left and right, and now and then I turned to see if anyone was moving up behind me. And I went on clutching the gun, my finger resting lightly alongside the trigger.

  I crossed Broadway, walked on past Lincoln Center and O'Neal's. I was on the dark block between Sixtieth and Sixty-first, across the street from Fordham, when I heard the car behind me and spun around. It was slanting across the wide avenue toward me and had cut off a cab. Maybe it was his brakes I heard, maybe that's what made me turn.

  I threw myself down on the pavement, rolled away from the street toward the buildings, came up with the.32 in my hand. The car was even with me now, its wheels straightened out. I'd thought it was going to vault the curb but it wasn't. And the windows were open and someone was leaning out the rear window, looking my way, and he had something in his hand-

  I had the gun pointed at him. I was prone, elbows braced in front of me, holding the gun in both hands. I had my finger on the trigger.

  The man leaning out the window threw something, tossed it underhand. I thought, Jesus, a bomb, and I aimed at him and felt the trigger beneath my finger, felt it tremble like some little live thing, and I froze, I froze, I couldn't pull the fucking trigger.

  Time froze, too, like a stop-frame sequence in a film. Eight or ten yards from me a bottle struck the brick wall of a building and smashed. There was no explosion beyond the shattering of the glass. It was just an empty bottle.

  And the car was just a car. I watched now as it went on careening south on Ninth Avenue, six kids in it, six drunken kids, and they might well kill somebody, they were drunk enough to do it, but when they did it would be an accident. They weren't professional killers, hitmen dispatched to murder me. They were just a bunch of kids who'd had more to drink than they could handle. Maybe they'd cripple someone, maybe they'd total their car, maybe they'd make it home without bending a fender.

  I got up slowly, looked at the gun in my hand. Thank God I hadn't fired it. I could have shot them, I could have killed them.

  God knows I'd wanted to. I'd tried to, thinking logically enough that they were trying to kill me.

  But I'd been unable to do it. And if it had been pros, if the object I'd seen had been not a whiskey bottle but the gun or bomb I'd thought it was, I'd have been no more able to pull the trigger. They'd have killed me and I'd have died with an unfired revolver in my hands.

  Jesus.

  I dropped the useless gun in my pocket. I held out my hand, surprised that it wasn't shaking. I didn't even feel particularly shaky inside, and I was damned if I could figure out why not.

  I went over to examine the broken bottle, if only to make sure it was just that and not a Molotov cocktail that had providentially failed to ignite. But there was no puddle, no reek of gasoline. There was a slight whiskey smell, unless I imagined it, and a label attached to one chunk of glass indicated that the bottle had contained J B Scotch. Other fragments of green glass sparkled like jewels in the light of the streetlamp.

  I bent over and picked up a little cube of glass. I placed it in the palm of my hand and stared at it
like a gypsy at a crystal. I thought of Donna's poem and Sunny's note and my own slip of the tongue.

  I started walking. It was all I could do to keep from running.

  Chapter 27

  "Jesus, I need a shave," Durkin said. He'd just dropped what was left of his cigarette into what was left of his coffee, and he was running one hand over his cheek, feeling the stubble. "I need a shave, I need a shower, I need a drink. Not necessarily in that order. I put out an APB on your little Colombian friend. Octavio Ignacio Calderуn y La Barra. Name's longer'n he is. I checked the morgue. They haven't got him down there in a drawer. Not yet, anyway."

  He opened his top desk drawer, withdrew a metal shaving mirror and a cordless electric shaver. He leaned the mirror against his empty coffee cup, positioned his face in front of it and began shaving. Over the whirr of the shaver he said, "I don't see anything in her file about a ring."

  "Mind if I look?"

  "Be my guest."

  I studied the inventory sheet, knowing the ring wouldn't be on it. Then I went over the photographs of the death scene. I tried to look only at her hands. I looked at every picture, and in none of them could I spot anything that suggested she was wearing a ring.

  I said as much to Durkin. He switched off the shaver, reached for the photographs, went through them carefully and deliberately. "It's hard to see her hands in some of these," he complained. "All right, there's definitely no ring on that hand. What's that, the left hand? No ring on the left hand. Now in this shot, okay, definitely no ring on that hand. Wait a minute. Shit, that's the left hand again. It's not clear in this one. Okay, here we go. That's definitely her right hand and there's no ring on it." He gathered the photos together like cards to be shuffled and dealt. "No ring," he said. "What's that prove?"

  "She had a ring when I saw her. Both times I saw her."

  "And?"

  "And it disappeared. It's not at her apartment. There's a ring in her jewelry box, a high school class ring, but that's not what I remember seeing on her hand."

  "Maybe your memory's false."

  I shook my head. "The class ring doesn't even have a stone. I went over there before I came here, just to check my memory. It's one of those klutzy school rings with too much lettering on it. It's not what she was wearing. She wouldn't have worn it, not with this mink and the wine-colored nails."

  I wasn't the only one who'd said so. After my little epiphany with the bit of broken glass, I'd gone straight to Kim's apartment, then used her phone to call Donna Campion. "It's Matt Scudder," I said. "I know it's late, but I wanted to ask you about a line in your poem."

  She'd said, "What line? What poem?"

  "Your poem about Kim. You gave me a copy."

  "Oh, yes. Just give me a moment, will you? I'm not completely awake."

  "I'm sorry to call so late, but-"

  "That's all right. What was the line?"

  "Shatter / Wine bottles at her feet, let green glass / Sparkle upon her hand."

  "Sparkle's wrong."

  "I've got the poem right here, it says-"

  "Oh, I know that's what I wrote," she said, "but it's wrong. I'll have to change it. I think. What about the line?"

  "Where did you get the green glass from?"

  "From the shattered wine bottles."

  "Why green glass on her hand? What's it a reference to?"

  "Oh," she said. "Oh, I see what you mean. Her ring."

  "She had a ring with a green stone, didn't she?"

  "That's right."

  "How long did she have it?"

  "I don't know." She thought it over. "The first time I saw it was just before I wrote the poem."

  "You're sure of that?"

  "At least that's the first time I noticed it. It gave me a handle on the poem, as a matter of fact. The contrast of the blue of her eyes and the green of the ring, but then I lost the blue when I got working on the poem."

  She'd told me something along those lines when she first showed me the poem. I hadn't known then what she was talking about.

  She wasn't sure when that might have been. How long had she been working on one or another version of the poem? Since a month before Kim's murder? Two months?

  "I don't know," she said. "I have trouble placing events in time. I don't tend to keep track."

  "But it was a ring with a green stone."

  "Oh, yes. I can picture it now."

  "Do you know where she got it? Who gave it to her?"

  "I don't know anything about it," she said. "Maybe-"

  "Yes?"

  "Maybe she shattered a wine bottle."

  To Durkin I said, "A friend of Kim's wrote a poem and mentioned the ring. And there's Sunny Hendryx's suicide note." I got out my notebook, flipped it open. I read, " 'There's no way off the merry-go-round. She grabbed the brass ring and it turned her finger green. Nobody's going to buy me emeralds.' "

  He took the book from me. "She meaning Dakkinen, I suppose," he said. "There's more here. 'Nobody's going to give me babies. Nobody's going to save my life.' Dakkinen wasn't pregnant and neither was Hendryx, so what's this shit about babies? And neither one of them had her life saved." He closed the book with a snap, handed it across the desk to me. "I don't know where you can go with this," he said. "It doesn't look to me like something you can take to the bank. Who knows when Hendryx wrote this? Maybe after the booze and the pills started working, and who can say where she was coming from?"

  Behind us, two men in plainclothes were putting a young white kid in the holding cage. A desk away, a sullen black woman was answering questions. I picked up the top photo on the stack and looked at Kim Dakkinen's butchered body. Durkin switched on the razor and finished shaving.

  "What I don't understand," he said, "is what you think you got. You think she had a boyfriend and the boyfriend gave her the ring. Okay. You also figured she had a boyfriend and he gave her the fur jacket, and you traced that and it looks as though you were right, but the jacket won't lead to the boyfriend because he kept his name out of it. If you can't trace him with a jacket that we've got, how can you trace him with a ring that all we know about it is it's missing? You see what I mean?"

  "I see what you mean."

  "That Sherlock Holmes thing, the dog that didn't bark, well what you got is a ring that isn't there, and what does it prove?"

  "It's gone."

  "Right."

  "Where'd it go?"

  "Same place a bathtub ring goes. Down the fucking drain. How do I know where it went?"

  "It disappeared."

  "So? Either it walked away or someone took it."

  "Who?"

  "How do I know who?"

  "Let's say she wore it to the hotel where she was killed."

  "You can't know that."

  "Let's just say so, all right?"

  "Okay, run with it."

  "Who took it? Some cop yank it off her finger?"

  "No," he said. "Nobody'd do that. There's people who'll take cash if it's loose, we both know that, but a ring off a murder victim's finger?" He shook his head. "Besides, nobody was alone with her. It's something nobody'd do with somebody else watching."

  "How about the maid? The one who discovered the body?"

  "Jesus, no way. I questioned the poor woman. She took one look at the body and started screaming and she'd still be screaming now if she had the breath left. You couldn'ta got her close enough to Dakkinen to touch her with a mop handle."

  "Who took the ring?"

  "Assuming she wore it there-"

  "Right."

  "So the killer took it."

  "Why?"

  "Maybe he's queer for jewelry. Maybe green's his favorite color."

  "Keep going."

  "Maybe it's valuable. You got a guy who goes around killing people, his morals aren't the best. He might not draw the line at stealing."

  "He left a few hundred dollars in her purse, Joe."

  "Maybe he didn't have time to go through her bag."

  "He had time to t
ake a shower, for Christ's sake. He had time to go through her bag. In fact, we don't know that he didn't go through her bag. We just know he didn't take the money."

  "So?"

  "But he took the ring. He had time to take hold of her bloody hand and tug it off her finger."

  "Maybe it came off easy. Maybe it wasn't a snug fit."

  "Why'd he take it?"

  "He wanted it for his sister."

  "Got any better reasons?"

  "No," he said. "No, goddamn it, I don't have any better reasons. What are you getting at? He took it because it could be traced to him?"

  "Why not?"

  "Then why didn't he take the fur? We fucking know a boyfriend bought her the fur. Maybe he didn't use his name, but how can he be sure of what he let slip and what the salesman remembers? He took towels, for Christ's sake, so he wouldn't leave a fucking pubic hair behind, but he left the fur. And now you say he took the ring. Where did this ring come from besides left field? Why have I got to hear about this ring tonight when I never heard of it once in the past two and a half weeks?"

  I didn't say anything. He picked up his cigarettes, offered me one. I shook my head. He took one for himself and lit it. He took a drag, blew out a column of smoke, then ran a hand over his head, smoothing down the dark hair that already lay flat upon his scalp.

  He said, "Could be there was some engraving. People do that with rings, engraving on the inside. To Kim from Freddie, some shit like that. You think that's it?"

  "I don't know."

  "You got a theory?"

  I remembered what Danny Boy Bell had said. If the boyfriend commanded such muscle, was so well connected, how come he hadn't shown her off? And if it was someone else with the muscle and the connections and the insufficient words to the wise, how did that someone else fit in with the boyfriend? Who was this accountant type who paid for her mink, and why wasn't I getting a smell of him from anywhere else?

  And why did the killer take the ring?

  I reached into my pocket. My fingers touched the gun, felt its cool metal, slipped beneath it to find the little cube of broken green glass that had started all of this. I took it from my pocket and looked at it, and Durkin asked me what it was.